One by one, Nuance is delivering on its promise to meld accurate speech recognition, artificial intelligence and biometric-based authentication into a resource that recognizes an individual and quickly gauges his or her intent. The product strategy already delivered DragonGo!, a results-oriented, voice controlled mobile search app. At January’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), it debuted Dragon TV to provide voice-based navigation of increasingly complex program guides and delivery channels for multiple media. Last month brought Dragon Drive, as a mechanism for individuals to take charge of the entertainment center and messaging needs that arise in an automobile.

Now comes Dragon ID, a flavor of the Dragon brand that lets mobile phone users activate and unlock their smartphones or other mobile devices by using a simple passphrase. The video below illustrates how it can be used:

While it lacks the star quality of Sam Jackson, John Malkovich or Zooey Deschanel, the video one ups Apple’s prime time TV commercials by showcasing the combination of automated speech processing and natural language processing and adding two new features: a wake-up word and voice biometric-based authentication. The result, branded as Dragon ID, make a smartphone into a highly personalized virtual assistant. The message is, “if you like how Siri recognizes what you’re trying to say, just think about how it will do a better job if it also recognized who you are by the sound of your voice.

The demo video showed how two different people could use different applications on the same device. That was a nice touch. So was planting the idea of using your voice to authorize a payment and avoide the line at the company cafeteria (though there are some missing links in that value chain).

Nuance provides more detail on how you set up a smartphone in this video. In it, you can see how several individuals can enroll themselves to share the same device.

Unlike DragonGo!, the Dragon ID capability will not be packaged as a downloadable app. Instead, Nuance is making it available to device manufacturers (OEMs). The software initially supports English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean for Android “and other platforms,” (unspecified). Nuance says additional languages will be made available this year.

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